Can Scribes Help Improve Emergency Practice Productivity?

Yet another article published trumpeting the values of using medical scribes.  A highlighted quote from this piece:  

"The use of scribes in healthcare has grown dramatically in recent years, particularly in field of emergency medicine. There are several reasons for this growth, but one of the important is the widespread adoption of electronic health records.

"'The implementation of electronic medical records in many emergency departments has required a physician learning curve,' suggested Luis Moreno, MD, CMO of Scribe America, when I spoke with him in the summer of 2010. 'The systems often aren't user friendly. As a result, EMRs actually increase chart documentation time. Interacting with a computer terminal instead of a patient is not an efficient use of a physician's time; thus, the need for scribes.'"

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Scribes for Nurses & PAs

UBM Medica's latest white paper focuses on nurses' use of digital media.

It's no surprise that they, like doctors, have concerns about work-life balances and staying up-to-date on the latest treatment information. As nurses begin to adopt more and more digital technology, they will need also the assistance from scribes and data managers to help them deal well with these work-life concerns. Scribes would free them up also to have the time focus on their their patients and stay up-to-date on the latest medical findings and treatments.

Medical Scribes Can Help Improve EHR User Satisfaction Rates

In this brief video, Kenneth Adler, Medical Director for IT at Arizona Community Physicians in Tucson, AZ, discuss some of the key findings from an annual EHR User Satisfaction survey conducted since 2005. (Courtesy of PhysiciansPractice online.)

Adler discusses the low level of satisfaction rates among physicians with EHRs, and identifies it as a worrying trend for the future of EHR companies and EHR adoption rates. Physicians Angels and other medical scribe companies on the market today believe medical scribes are a logical 'personnel tool' doctors and medical networks should be taking advantage of to ensure optimal use of their EHRs.

EHRs are a necessary and vital tool to improve health care. We would argue physicians are unhappy with EHRs, for the most part, because of 'user-unfriendly' interfaces and having to spend too much time doing data entry. Physicians went to school to become highly-skilled and -paid medical professionals, not $10/hour data entry clerks with an EHR. Medical scribes remove the cumbersome and time-consuming task of data entry from a physician's busy workday, and allows them to do what they do best: provide quality patient care.

Medical Scribes: Making Your EHR "User Friendly"

This in-depth article, entitled "User Unfriendly," from Health Data Management discusses the one consistent complaint we at Physicians Angels hear from doctors and their staff about their EHRs: usability problems. This article also quotes an Institute of Medicine report on the topic of EHR usability:

Poor EHR design might be a patient safety issue. The Institute of Medicine's (IOM) November 2011 report, "Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care," cited lack of usability as one potential cause of errors in using EHRs: "Poor interface design that detracts from clinician efficiency and affinity for the system will likely lead to underuse or misuse of the system." While the hazards of poor design haven't been quantified in any large-scale studies, hair-raising anecdotes are plentiful: medication lists broken up over several pages, positive lab results buried in long lists, and notes cut-and-pasted from one section of the record to another without requiring a check to see whether they're still valid.

Physicians Angels was created by physicians five years ago to address this very issue. It led us to conclude that a new generation of medical data managers are needed to help physicians handle EHR documentation requirements and data care during clinic hours. We call them virtual medical scribes, but you can think of them also as 'EHR data technicians.'

Just as CT-scan and EKG devices require technicians, so do EHRs. This seems counterintuitive to some, since EHRs look and feel like software products we use comfortably in our homes. However, a growing body of research shows that anything that comes between the physician and patient in the exam room -- including an EHR, no matter how well-designed -- reduces the doctor's productivity, increases the amount of time spent documenting exams, and affects negatively the doctor-patient encounter.

An EHR often becomes just another time-consuming distraction for a doctor trying to focus on the patient's care. A medical scribe eliminates that distraction by taking care of the notes, ICD/CPT codes, e-prescription, and other chores for physicians and their staff during clinic hours. Doctors still have to sit down, review their notes daily, and sign off. But rather than spending precious time during exams and hours into the evening handling documentation chores, medical scribes handle that data care for you so it's finished by the time you go home.